By the eve of World War II, nationalist leaders and industrialists alike were concerned about unregulated industrial competition among regions. A national tripartite structure of industrial relations was thus initiated at the beginning of the war. War-time political re-alignments, including Quit India, Indian Communists’ support for the war efforts, as well as the Labour Party’s influence in the UK war cabinet, changed the context for negotiating social security. Dr B.R Ambedkar, who became Minister for Labour on the Viceroy’s Executive Council in 1942, pushed an all-India agenda of social security for industrial workers. This chapter charts the agreement by representatives of employers and workers to a contributory model of sickness insurance within the new structure of tripartism. This was inspired by Beveridgean policy development in Europe during the war but was ultimately confined to a more Bismarckian focus on industrial labour. On the eve of independence, an accommodation between labour and capital helped enforce a floor in labour market competition within India and paved the way for sickness insurance to be enacted in 1948 as part of India’s new industrial relations regime.

This chapter is the first of two focused on the period between 1919 and 1947 bookended by, on the one hand, India’s membership of the new International Labour Organisation in 1919 and, on the other, the birth of independent India in 1947. Together these chapters chart the origins of a social insurance-led model for a future Indian welfare state directed towards an industrial working class. The chapter also documents how - facing rising industrial unrest - the newly elected provincial government of Bombay, the historic centre of India’s textile industry, began to experiment with social insurance. Limited decentralisation under successive Government of India Acts had provided greater autonomy to provinces in the field of labour policy. Bombay was the first to introduce maternity benefits. It then became the first to support sickness insurance for industrial workers as a means of labour force stabilisation. However, given fierce inter-regional competition within India’s textile industry, the adoption of sickness insurance did not proceed because without national coordination Bombay would have been disadvantaged in competition with regions without labour regulation.